<p>You’re looking at this all wrong. Cal can and does compete with Stanford for national, academic and athletic recruits. The staff generally aims for kids with above a 3.5, which may not be on par with Stanford’s admissions, but Stanford has ridiculous admission criteria for athletes as well, while Cal does to a certain extant. Take Wayne Lyons for example, did Cal recruit him? Maybe, but the fact was he was not a major need for our recruiting class as our LB core from last year is sufficient to say the LEAST. If you look at the majority of our recruits in the incoming class you can see that most have good academic standing compared to the likes of other schools in our own conference. At Cal, we have the opportunity to take kids that may not be great academically, but are great athletically and that is shown by our high rated recruiting class which is better than Stanford’s. Also, a lot of HS athletes have inflated GPAs, and their SAT is a better indicator of their actual intelligence. Coming back to the Wayne Lyons example, he had a three part 1230 SAT and a 22 on the ACT…</p>